Dangerous Gun Myths

Editorial | The Gun Challenge

Dangerous Gun Myths

The debate over what to do to reduce gun violence in America hit an
absurd low point on Wednesday when a Senate witness tried to portray a
proposed new ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines as some
sort of sexist plot that would disproportionately hurt vulnerable women
and their children.

The witness was Gayle Trotter, a fellow at the Independent Women’s
Forum, a right-wing public policy group that provides pseudofeminist
support for extreme positions that are in fact dangerous to women. She
told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the limits on firepower
proposed by Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, would harm women
because an assault weapon “in the hands of a young woman defending her
babies in her home becomes a defense weapon.” She spoke of the “peace of
mind” and “courage” a woman derives from “knowing she has a
scary-looking gun” when she’s fighting violent criminals.

It is not at all clear where Ms. Trotter gained her insight into
confrontations between women and heavily armed intruders, since it is
not at all clear that sort of thing happens often. It is tempting to
dismiss her notion that an AR-15 is a woman’s best friend as the kooky
reflex response of someone ideologically opposed to gun control laws and
who, in her case, has also been a vociferous opponent of the Violence
Against Women Act, the 1994 law that assists women facing domestic
violence.

But it is important to note that Ms. Trotter was chosen to testify by
the committee’s Republican members, who will have a big say on what, if
anything, Congress does on guns; and that her appearance before the
committee was to give voice to the premise, however insupportable and
dangerous it may be, that guns make women and children safer — and the
more powerful the guns the better.

Ms. Trotter related the story of Sarah McKinley, an 18-year-old Oklahoma
woman who shot and killed an intruder on New Year’s Eve 2011, when she
was home alone with her baby. The story was telling, but not in the way
she intended, as Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat, pointed
out. The woman was able to repel the intruder using an ordinary
Remington 870 Express 12-gauge shotgun, which would not be banned under
the proposed statute. She did not need a military-style weapon with a
30-round magazine.

But there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that guns actually
protect the hearth and home. Guns rarely get used that way. In the
1990s, a team headed by Arthur Kellermann of Emory University looked at
all injuries involving guns kept in the home in Memphis, Seattle and
Galveston, Tex. They found that these weapons were fired far more often
in accidents, criminal assaults, homicides or suicide attempts than in
self-defense. For every instance in which a gun in the home was shot in
self-defense, there were seven criminal assaults or homicides, four
accidental shootings, and 11 attempted or successful suicides.

The cost-benefit balance of having a gun in the home is especially
negative for women, according to a 2011 review by David Hemenway,
director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Far from making
women safer, a gun in the home is “a particularly strong risk factor”
for female homicides and the intimidation of women.

In domestic violence situations, the risk of homicide for women
increased eightfold when the abuser had access to firearms, according to
a study published in The American Journal of Public Health in 2003.
Further, there was “no clear evidence” that victims’ access to a gun
reduced their risk of being killed. Another 2003 study, by Douglas Wiebe
of the University of Pennsylvania, found that females living with a gun
in the home were 2.7 times more likely to be murdered than females with
no gun at home.

Regulating guns, on the other hand, can reduce that risk. An analysis by
Mayors Against Illegal Guns found that in states that required a
background check for every handgun sale, women were killed by intimate
partners at a much lower rate. Senator Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary
Committee chairman, has used this fact to press the case for universal
background checks, to make sure that domestic abusers legally prohibited
from having guns cannot get them.

As for the children whose safety Ms. Trotter professes to be so
concerned about, guns in the home greatly increase the risk of youth
suicides. That is why the American Academy of Pediatrics has long urged
parents to remove guns from their homes.

The idea that guns are essential to home defense and women’s safety is a
myth. It should not be allowed to block the new gun controls that the
country so obviously needs.